Review of 'Slade House' by David Mitchell

I really, really didn't like this book, even though I am a fan of David Mitchell. Was this an early book that was rejected, and then retrieved from the reject pile after he became successful? Or some sort of contractual obligation book? I don't know, but I do know that it's supernatural-themed (which I don't like), and horror (which I like even less), and formulaic (the same sort of thing, varying slightly, happens in each chapter - which is always set on the last Saturday of October at nine-year intervals. 

The explanation towards the end of what has been happening felt forced and implausible - not only the explanation itself but the mechanism by which the reader was getting it. And there's lots of deception, in which both the victim characters, and the reader, is misled about what's going on - do I like this even less because it feels so much like what's going on in the real world, with confusing misinformation and retraction about everything - the virus, Brexit, and so on? Hard to know, but I do know that I really didn't like it.

David Mitchell is a good writer, and manages to make the occult-codswallop on which the plot hangs feel almost plausible. Some of the place descriptions are particular good, and did rather remind me of the feeling of dreams, but that sort of makes it worse. I didn't want to read this in bed for fear it would turn up in my dreams, which are bad enough as it is.

Review of "Failure of a revolution: Germany 1918-1919" by Sebastian Haffner

 

This is one of the best books I've read all year. As the title suggests it's an account of the failed German revolution at the end of WW1, and even though we know how it ends it's gripping all the way through. It's also tragic, and bitter, and has sparked a lot of thoughts in me. Firstly, about how hard it is to make a revolution; it's easy to focus on the successes, but most attempts at insurrection fail. This one got further than most - the masses really were on the street, the old order had more or less collapsed, and still it failed...I do wish the Extinction Rebellion "High Command" would read this instead of the pseudo-scientific bollocks from Erica Chenoweh that they wallow in. This shows what happens when a movement is able to create a revolutionary situtation but is neither ready nor willing to seize power; someone else will seize it instead. Here is was the right wing of the SPD, who paved the way for the restoration of the old order (minus the Kaiser). 

Second, about how awful Second International socialist parties could be. The German SPD had become a part of the Willhelmine German Empire, but still postured as a party of revolutionary socialism, red flags and Internationale and all. It had supported the Empire in pursuing the War - almost all its parliamentary deputies had voted for war credits, and its efforts to end the war once it became obvious that Germany would not win an easy victory were half-hearted and pitiful. And its politics during the period covered by this book are heart-breakingly awful, supporting its enemies - the old officer class, the reactionary nationalists, and the conservative forces in society - in massacring the party's working class supporters. In my readings about the 1930s I've generally tended to put the blame on the German Communist Part - the KPD - for not making a united front with the SPD against the Nazis. But reading this book gives me a better understanding as to how hard this would have been, and how deep the hostility must have run. When the KPD said the SPD were 'social fascists', there was some truth to it, at least as far as the leadership is concerned.  Why the SPD rank and file stayed with the party is something of a mystery to me, but I suppose the alternative was largely the Stalin-inflected KPD, which was equally awful in a completely different way.

I read this book in a free download from Libcom, obtained from here. https://libcom.org/library/failure-revolution-germany-1918-1919-sebastian-haffner

I heard about it in a review in the LRB, which was ostensibly about another book about Weimar but kept coming back to talking about Haffner, for which I am grateful.

Review of 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom'

Film about Black musicians and singer Ma Rainey in 1920s Chicago, with exploitative recording studio owners, racism, and lots of tension between singer, studio owners and backing band. Derived from a stage play, and with a very stage-y feel to it...lots of dialogue, not all that much happens. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Phantom Thread

 

Film about a dressmaker to the very rich and his very complex relationship with a young European woman (German?) that he meets at a seaside town where she's working as a waitress. He's very stuffy and posh like his clients, and selfish, childish, and self-obsessed, and encouraged in this by his sister who lives in the huge house (which also contains his business and workshop) and works in the business with him. 

He's brilliantly played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Impossible to describe the relationship without spoiling, but it makes the relationship depicted in The Duke of Burgundy look straightforward.

Was tempted to write this review as if I'd watched the film by mistake, thinking it was The Phantom Menace, but honestly this is much better.

The workshop scenes put me in mind of my grandfather's furrier workshop in Brighton, also full of women sewing, work in progress, fitting dummies and of course heaps of furs, which used to smell wonderful. 

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Workshop'

 

French film about a group of somewhat alienated young people who are attending a writing workshop in La Ciotat (town in the south, near Cassis) run by a Parisian woman writer - they seem to be there out of something less than great interest in writing, though one of them wants to be a writer or journalist. They're a mixed bunch - a couple of Muslims, a young black guy, and the central character Antoine, who is a dissaffected white guy who is flirting with the far right. He and his mates fool around with a gun, drink, dance and smoke weed. 

There's a bit of backstory about the town and the workers' struggle to save the shipyard (now hanging on as a repair facility for the yachts of the super-rich).

It's mainly long and a bit slow, but it gradually rachets up the tension and the character development, particularly of Antoine. Well worth watching.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Player of Games' by Iain M Banks

Enjoyed this more than the first one in the series...more about The Culture and what fully automated luxury communism is like, artfully described by taking the protagonist to a different culture, and then commenting on the differences. Not so much space opera either, so more drama and personal elements, even if some of that happens between people and machines. 

Now looking forward to reading the next one.

Review of 'Essex Girls' by Sarah Perry

An essay in little-book form, and really enjoyable. I loved The Essex Serpent, and here we get a little bit of insight into Perry's hinterland - raised as some sort of strict and dowdy Protestant in gloomy flat Essex, with nothing at all of the unbridled licentious vulgar Essex Girl about her, and yet some sense of connection and kinship with the archetype of a woman who won't accept the definition of others. 

I'd have liked more dissection of the stereotype - after all, Essex Girls are essentially a working-class version of other kinds of irresponsible woman (like say 'Flappers'), and I think the class dimension is under-discussed here and elsewhere.

But it's an enjoyable read and a celebration of some forgotten but important women.

Review of 'The Prom'

Cheesy spoof of cheesy musicals, in which a group of washed-up actors from Broadway musicals decide to improve their image by finding a cause, and hit upon a young lesbian woman who is barred from attending her high school prom because she wants to take her same-sex partner. Lots of jokes about New Yorkers and the liberal elite not understanding 'ordinary people' - Meryl Streep's character has never heard of the diner chain Appleby's, which seems to occupy the same place in the US hospitality pantheon as say Harvester Inns in the UK, though the actually look a bit nicer in the film...was this product placement?

Lots of other product placement, but also some good jokes and big song numbers. Oddly it seems to be set in an America where there are no other social problems at all, in particular no race issues - the nice young lesbian woman's putative same-sex partner is African-American, and this is not even worth mentioning. The young men, and the young women, in the film, all hang out with each other across the racial divide. 

But was enjoyable to watch.

Watched on Netflix

Review of 'Venus'

It's not going to be easy for an English man in his 60s to review a film which is basically a series of intercut interviews by young Danish women talking about their sexual experiences. But a few observations nonetheless.

The film is not remotely erotic, though the young women are nice-looking. It's mainly interesting, though I did have a few little dozes...normal for man in his 60s watching a film from the sofa in the late afternoon, I'd say. 

For the most part sex seems to be more a source of misery than happiness for these women. They have very few orgasms compared to the number of times they have sex, or the number of sexual partners they have. They're concerned about what they ought to be doing, how they ought to be doing it, and what others will think. And these are women in Denmark, probably the best country in the world to be a woman. Of course they might be a selected group, even though they have selected themselves by answering an open call to attend filming - if they weren't miserable maybe they wouldn't have attended.

And towards the end the film-makers, who are lesbians even though the subjects mainy aren't, ask the women to undress and show their naked bodies to the camera...most of them do this, even though a few don't or keep mainly out of shot. Why? I can see what it added to the film, but I still think it would have stood better without this. 

As I watched I wondered what a film of young men talking about their sexuality would be like, and I suspect it would also be full of insecurity and awkwardness. Maybe sex, except between stable regular partners, is just miserable, or more miserable than happy?

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Review of 'The Happy Prince'

 

Really sad period-dress film about the last days of Oscar Wilde's life, when he is living in France, and looking back on his glory days when he was successful and celebrated. He's hardly abandoned - there are lots of people around him who love him and look after him, but he's still infatuated with 'Bosie' - Lord Arthur Douglas, portrayed as a vain, selfish and unsympathetic character, while also wondering whether his wife might yet be reconciled to him. There are some really upsetting scenes with boy prostitutes, and others in which he is spat on by members of his once-adoring public or chased through the streets by posh young men intending to assault him for his moral crimes. Well done, but not exactly enjoyable.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Shape of Water'

Unusual surreal fantasy drama-thriller...Sally Hawkins plays a cleaner at some sort of secure/secret military base, where a strange amphibian humanoid creature (obviously modelled on the Creature from The Black Lagoon) is used for experiments by ruthless and cruel secret agents and scientists. There's a good and complex plot involving Soviet agents, Sally's neighbour (she lives in a weird flat above a cinema), her African-American work-mate, and several other really good characters. Very much an art director's film, with lots of great sets and settings to evoke the period atmosphere. Some horrid violence, and some weird sex, if that bothers you. But great.

Watched on All 4.

Review of 'Consider Phlebas' by Iain M Banks

Finally got round to reading this - it's been on my Kindle for years. Meant to because I understood it was intellectual, political and progressive science fiction, including a depiction of a civilisation that really is fully automated luxury communism. I enjoyed it, though I was expecting more of the intellectual stuff during the narrative, and it mainly isn't - it's more space opera, with the back story squeezed into a series of epilogues and appendices. 

And I will read all the others, and probably enjoy them too, though perhaps with lowered expectations.

Review of 'The Cut Out Girl' by Bart Van Es

I really don't like reading Holocaust literature, but I took a chance on this because (a) Ruth had read it and recommended it and (b) I'd heard an extract on the radio.

A good decision, though it's not an easy read. It's cleverly structured so that the narrative shifts between the author finding out what happened to the Jewish girl that his family took in and hid during the war, and the story as seen through the girl's eyes, as remembered by her grown up self and reconstructed by the author. Hanging over the story is the knowledge that the girl survives but then, as an adult in the 1980s, falls out with the family so that the author grows up without having known about her; we don't find out until fairly late in the book what this was about.

Although I thought I didn't have much to learn about the Holocaust, and everyone knows about Anne Frank, and lots of people know about the 1941 February strike against the deportations of Jews from Amsterdam, there was lots that shocked me. I didn't know that more Jews died in the Netherlands than in any other Western European country, or that this was in part because the Dutch contracted out the round-ups of Jews to competing private agencies - few of the Jews were rounded up by occupying German forces. 

And I was really stunned, and upset, to read about what happened to those survivors who returned from the camps to their country, to find that they weren't welcome, that their houses were occupied and they couldn't get them back, that they were liable for taxes for the years that they spent in the camps...and that the Calvinist "resistance" organisation tried hard to prevent those Jewish children who had been hidden from being returned to their families, or where there were no survivors of the families to other Jews who wanted to adopt them. They argued that by putting their children into hiding the Jewish families and communities had given up any rights to them. 

Not an easy read - lots of the personal stuff that happens to the girl of the story is hard too - but worth it.

Review of 'Fierce'

 

Once again a bad film in which - somewhere - there is a good film struggling and failing to get out. Reality talent show program host is suckered into doing an episode from his home village (it's Poland) from which he got out early, leaving behind a young woman who bore his child. Now years later the child, now an implausibly gorgeous young woman herself though still at school, goes on the talent show just so that she can meet the father, but he's shallow and trashy and they don't really meet. But she turns out to be a superstar singer, and she goes from round to round until...

Made worse by the fact that it's dubbed into American English - I liked it better when she was singing, because that's still in Polish. When it's English it seems like every other implausible teen movie. Warsaw looks awful, though I think the film thinks it looks glitzy, all plate glass and neon. There is no sign of the beautifully reconstructed old town, though I caught sight of one Stalinist-era building that I remembered in the centre of town, now swathed in neon. By contrast the village that the characters keep describing as a shithole from which they want to escape is beautiful, with a stunning river next to it. I want to go there, and I wish I knew where it is.

Like I said, there's actually some good elements in there - the breakdown of families, the tawdriness and impermanence of fame, the impact of celebrity and social media on real life - and I'd like to see what another, more subtle director would make of it.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Shame"

Hard-to-watch but worthwhile film about a man who is a sex addict. He has a lot of sex - with prostitutes, with casual pick-ups, and at one point in a gay club, though he doesn't appear to have had any gay inclinations until that moment - he just seems to need to come all the time. He wanks in the shower, he wanks in the toilet at work, and his work laptop is filled with porn - something that might have given him a problem, except that his boss seems to be very protective of him and agrees that they can blame it on the intern.

At one point in the film he almost develops an actual relationship with a co-worker, but she's interested in something that might have a future...and at that point he suddenly can't get it up. 

And there's a catastrophic relationship going on with his equally damaged sister, who has moved into his apartment because she has nowhere else to go.

Like I said, hard to watch, but worth it.

Watched on All4 via phone and Chromecast.